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Has anyone seen a non-english characters library for Ruby walking
around? For now, I need to remove letter decorators (in other words,
'ñ' becomes n and 'â' becomes a) and drop non-alphanumeric
characters ('!etter' becomes 'etter').
Those are some pretty simple functions that I could write myself
(actually I already have), but it would be nice to use some better
tested code.
Cheers,
Thiago Arrais

Thiago Arrais wrote:
> Has anyone seen a non-english characters library for Ruby walking> around? For now, I need to remove letter decorators (in other words,> 'ñ' becomes n and 'â' becomes a) and drop non-alphanumeric> characters ('!etter' becomes 'etter').>> Those are some pretty simple functions that I could write myself> (actually I already have), but it would be nice to use some better> tested code.
You could use the "unicode" library, by Yoshida Masato.
http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html
Example:
$ cat uni.rb
require 'unicode'
txt = 'ñ÷åòôùõéïðÁÓÄÆÇÈÊËÌ!@#*$%^&'
puts Unicode.decompose(txt).delete('^0-9A-Za-z')
$ ruby uni.rb
naoouoeiAOACEEEI
Good luck.

On Feb 13, 2007, at 7:00 PM, Thiago Arrais wrote:
> Has anyone seen a non-english characters library for Ruby walking> around? For now, I need to remove letter decorators (in other words,> 'ñ' becomes n and 'â' becomes a) and drop non-alphanumeric> characters ('!etter' becomes 'etter').>> Those are some pretty simple functions that I could write myself> (actually I already have), but it would be nice to use some better> tested code.
The best approach I've seen[*] is to decompose and map to ASCII:
Iconv.iconv('ascii//ignore//translit', 'utf-8', str)
and then sanitize.
I think this is better than the technique that passes through Unicode
decomposition because it also handles ß (ss), € (EUR), æ (ae), œ
(oe), etc.
-- fxn
[*] Seen in the source of the Rails plugin acts_as_friendly_param,
which in turn takes the idea from Mephisto.

* Thiago Arrais (thiago.arrais@gmail.com) wrote:
> Has anyone seen a non-english characters library for Ruby walking> around? For now, I need to remove letter decorators (in other words,> 'Ã±' becomes n and 'Ã¢' becomes a) and drop non-alphanumeric> characters ('!etter' becomes 'etter').
I thought iconv transliteration might do this, but it doesn't:
require 'iconv'
i = Iconv.new('ascii//TRANSLIT//IGNORE, 'iso-8859-1')
i.iconv('Ã±')
=> "?"
A bit of googling turns up the following:
* Text::Unaccent, a Perl module available via CPAN
(http://search.cpan.org/~ldachary/Text-Unaccent-1.0...)
* unac, a GNU utility (and library) that removes accents from
characters. (http://home.gna.org/unac/unac-man3.en.html)
Both work roughly the same way; they use iconv to convert the source
string to UTF-16BE, followed by a mapping table to map accented
characters to their non-accented equivalents.
The unac link above has a bit more information about how these mapping
tables are generated; basically they have a script that parses a unicode
data file at build time and generates the mapping table.
The mapping table is available here:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.2-Update/UnicodeDa...
So anyway, the answers to your question appears to be:
* If you're just converting a couple of characters one time, just
use a regular expression.
* If you're looking to convert an arbitrary number of characters one
time and have access to a machine with GNU tools, just use unac.
* If you're not particular about the language, use the Perl library.
* If you don't mind installing the unac library, I wrote a quick wrapper
for it. See below for more.
This has been discussed on ruby-talk before:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/...
I wrote a quick binding for the unac library, you can grab it from here:
http://pablotron.org/files/unac-ruby-0.1.0.tar.gz (tarball)
http://pablotron.org/files/unac-ruby-0.1.0.tar.gz.asc (PGP Signature)
http://hg.pablotron.org/unac-ruby (Mercurial Repository)
If you're interested, I can probably write a pure-Ruby version
relatively quickly too.